Took some knitting pictures with my phone and found some summer pictures that we’d forgotten about.
Thanks to all the rain we had in the spring and summer, we have the tallest grass and weeds we’ve seen in the last couple of years we’ve been here. Same holds true for this entire area. All the grazing animals have it easy, and so do the grasshoppers! There must be literally millions of those things around here right now much to the dismay of some of our garden plants. The turkeys are delighted by the bounty of grasshoppers.
Now the grass is all dry and brown/yellow. A friend suggested a herd of Guinea Pigs for mowing purposes since Dan won’t let me have sheep or cashmere goats (too many predators right down the hill along the creek). I have to say the idea of a herd of piggies makes me laugh every time I think of it.
Speaking of piggies, this morning we had at least 20 wild turkeys in the yard, all trying to sort out their pecking order for the coming fall. Some were continuing to snack on grasshoppers while the rest were swirling around and chasing each other, carrying on cranky. It was quite fun to watch.
Anyway back to summer.
The green was almost iridescent, it was so bright. There was a lot of snowfall last winter and lots of rain, and despite all that the creek didn’t flood. Kind of surprising, really. Such a peaceful place to rest and relax, sitting by the creek.
On to the knitting project which has been taking all my spare time for the last couple of months.
The yarn is so thin that the overhead lights in the kitchen reflect off the countertop and through the shawl. The first step is to thread a nylon yarn (not stretchy and slick so it won’t hang up on the shawl itself) through the points on the edges of the border. It is a somewhat tedious process trying to get the blocking yarn the right length on each side of the shawl. Then it’s time to get it wet.
Soaking the shawl for about an hour gets the yarn good and saturated with water.
While it was soaking we retrieved the blue solid foam panels I needed for blocking from the storage shed. So the first step for this process was actually killing the wasp nest they had built right above the storage shed door. Getting the panels out was a little exciting because a lot of wasps, which weren’t killed at the nest in the morning, were still inside the storage shed. We might be waiting for freezing weather before we try to do anything else in that shed!
Success, wasps mostly dead and foam boards are in the house. We laid them out on the counter top and covered them with a flannel sheet. Then it was time to block the shawl. I had to spray it with water frequently while I was blocking it, again because the yarn is so thin it dries very quickly.
Poor Mishkin kept running for cover. The “Cat Attitude Readjustment Tool,” CART for short, was going off unexpectedly and even though he wasn’t doing anything mischievous at the time it always pays to be proactive about avoiding drops of water. Oro just thought the entire thing was very exciting.
The idea behind blocking is to stretch the wet yarn as far as possible in all directions. The project retains that shape once it is all dry. Now it was just waiting until everything dried less than 24 hours later.
This morning it was all dry and I could remove all the t-pins and blocking yarn.
I had to feed the cat first, of course, before I worked on my project. Must always get the priorities right or there would be trouble.
Feels really weird not to be knitting something. I’m not sure how long I can let that go on. But we have other things to do. Today we’re removing all the shelves which are above the window (like the one above my head for example) and then patching holes in the sheet-rock. Painting the interior is in our immediate future.